Re: Is it possible to include graph in side the report?

It is definitely is doable. We've produced some reports like this at a few of our clients.

We've used JFreeChart to generate the images, which are then referenced in the main JSP report output.

The biggest gotcha - in terms of the PPM specific coding - is that the web application that serves files from the reports subdirectory is configured only to serve html files.

Our approach is to generate the charts as PNG files which are then stored, and to serve these stored files using a separate JSP or servlet.

Regarding coding effort:

Setting up the graphing sub-system or infrastructure is a lot of effort the first time you do it, but that effort can be reused afterwards (this includes getting a third-party library installed and working and implementing the mechanism to serve the PNG files).

Implementing an individual chart is more effort than developing just a query and the html to display it, but for a simple chart this is quite manageable.

That said, fiddling with the exact look and feel can be a lot of effort though.

A note:

Since the output is an HTML file containing external references, if a user wants to save and email a file, they need to take care that the graphs are included. On IE we recommend that they save the file as the type: